i was wondering if some of you guys could give me some advice or websites to optimizing video for the web. this is one aspect that always confused me. what do you all use to optimize and how do you get the best quality at a nice file size. quality is my main concern.

thanks,
mike

I'd like to echo Mike's request - outputting/encoding and getting the file size/quality balance right is still a black art for me.
When I look at some of the great material from other members I feel both frustrated - and inspired!

Its all about the bit rate!

I don't know of any sites right now but I can poke around google later hopefully.

What I can tell you is that each video will be different. They will be similar but you will find some videos are very simple and don't require such a high bit rate as say a sports video with lots of action. In terms of testing doing lots and lots of encoding can be time consuming so make sure that you only encode a few seconds of the whole video and use that same section over and over again so you can compare your changes.

Some Suggestions:

Try to keep the resolution low. IMO it is better to have a lower resolution yet higher bit rate. My experience is that a higher resolution file with a lower bit rate will be the same size but the first will look better. It will also generally play back better on slower machines.

Depending on the complexity of the video keyframe more often. For sports videos I will keyframe every 30 frames or every second. Other times not so much. A keyframe contains all the info in the picture so its a whole picture the codec can use.

I suggest using FLV and MP4. Currently you can combine these two into one of the best viewing experiences online. With the flash players you can allow your viewer to almost instantly watch your videos if they are on broadband without them having to download the whole file. The newest version of flash also supports H264 so you can use those files for the best quality and if they do not have the latest flash it can fall back to a standard FLV version.

Multi-pass encodes will also look better when doing variable bit rates. The first pass is the encoder figuring out where to best spend the budget of bits which should give the best results.

Hopefully some others will chime in with additional suggestions.

Josh is right. One has to experiment because every video is slightly different with respect to motion and exposure etc. Higher bit rate is better.

How to save for web:

Go download windows media encoder (www.microsoft.com)
Do a custom session
Choose File in the sources tab and locate the file you want to convert
Under output disable pull from encoder and then choose encode to file. (Give that file a name)
Under the compression tab drop down Destination and change it to web server progressive
Change video to DVD quality (CBR)
Click Edit
Click allow nonsquare pixels
In the second tab change the video size to 720x480 (you might need to make this smaller depending on available bandwidth and such. Just make sure you keep the aspect ratio the same.)
Click OK.
Now go to the Video Size tab.
Change the Pixel aspect ratio to whatever you need (If its 720x480 wide screen choose dv NTSC 16x9)
Under Attributes you can give it some Meta data if you wish
Now click Apply
Then click start encoding.
Upload.
Enjoy.